US residents continue to pay exorbitant prices
for prescriptions.

The pharmacy benefits schemes (PBS) in countries like Australia and Canada enable the Medicare and medical benefit funds to acquire generic prescription drugs. For people in those countries, this cuts billions of dollars off their medication costs.

In the USA George Bush’s heralded Medicare Prescription Benefit was passed [Nov. 25, 2003], giving generous benefits to only the insurance and drug companies.

Unfortunately, the benefits do not go into effect until 2006. In the meantime, millions of Americans must continue to look North or purchase from online pharmacies to reduce their medication costs.

If you watched the AARP’s $7-million media blitz pushing for passage — that’s your money if you’re a member — you know that you are seeing the final death rattle of an idea that could have saved countless thousands of senior lives and immeasurable suffering — physical, financial, and emotional.

You would have heard AARP declare, “There are millions of Americans who can't afford to wait for perfect. They need action now." Here’s what AARP won’t tell you:
“…action now” actually starts in 2006 when the bill takes affect. In the meantime, you’ll get a near useless drug discount card not unlike those now handed to seniors free by many pharmacies.

The new Medicare drug plan will pay for only about one in every five dollars needed to cover the medicine doctors say seniors need.* In spite of new subsidies to business, an estimated 4 million retirees will be cut off from drug benefits they currently receive under their previous employer’s pension plans.

Will you be among them? Intense lobbying and millions in legal bribes to politicians pay off big for America’s drug companies, as the bill prohibits Medicare from negotiating drug discounts.

According to Boston University’s School of Public Health, 61 percent of this new drug benefit will end up as a windfall bottom-line profit to drug makers. That means…$139 billion dollars will go directly from taxpayer’s pockets to the world’s most profitable industry in increased profits over eight years.

The fear is that Medicare will die. The new bill offers private health insurers $12 billion in subsidies to compete against Medicare, may the best plan win! (How else could they compete? HMOs spend 15 - 32 percent on overhead where Medicare spends less than 2 percent.)

Insurers will most likely cherry-pick the healthiest of seniors, forcing on them their doctors and hospitals. Of course, these HMOs will return again and again to the trough demanding more subsidies with the threat of stopping benefits. Not so much free enterprise as law of the jungle will descend.

When politicians and AARP say the bill “will especially help the poorest of us,” we wonder if they can be trusted. If Congress had wanted to help those who need help most, they would have devoted the entire $40 billion annual drug subsidy to the poor. That would have made sense. Instead, the poor elderly get $600 annual relief. If your yearly income is above $13,000, you’re ineligible for any additional help.

Congress has twice passed and two presidents have signed legislation designed to make it legal to reimport drugs from Canada. Yet the power of Big Pharma pushed Congress to make it “illegal” for you to save 40 – 90 percent by buying your drugs in Canada. As about 1.2 million Americans currently do just that, the FDA will probably continue to allow such reimportation.

Arresting Granny at the border will not do. But to save more than half of the $400 billion 10-year cost of this bill by allowing Medicare to buy in Canada is absolutely, positively prohibited by law.

Among the many other anomolies hidden in the 1100-page bill is a cap on the use of general revenues for Medicare. This will create a phony crisis around 2010 leading to cutbacks in Medicare-covered hospital and doctor care, as well as drug benefits, significantly increasing your out-of-pocket costs.

This biggest of all Medicare fraud will be lauded by politicians, by AARP, by all who profit from its passing.

* To see your yearly out-of-pocket drug costs under the latest Medicare drug benefit bill proposal, go to http://defazio.house.gov/medicarerxcalc.html. You may be amazed.

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